This is a continuation of my last post…
In light of yesterday’s post I thought I should share my personal experience regarding health and school. While earning my MBA I pretty much set everything not work or school related aside. I would get off of work, drive home, eat dinner and study. Sometimes I would be studying or doing homework until 4AM at night. In fact I would be up so late that my wife would have a hard time sleeping what with my walking around, turning on lights, making coffee and generally just making noise. So eventually I started pulling my all night study sessions at a Waffle House down the street from where our house at that time was. I didn’t work out, I didn’t eat right and I didn’t generally concern myself with my health in general. I was simply too busy burning the candle at both ends. In short, I gained about 20 pounds, was placed on prescriptions for high cholesterol, developed physical symptoms of overstress, was told by my doctor that I was very high risk for diabetes and pretty much was on my way to an early grave in every way you could think of.
After graduating I took a good long look at myself. According to my doctor my health was just in shambles, I had done so much damage in such a short amount of time that she and I worked together to develop a plan to reverse all the bad I had done to myself. I’m posting all of this here now because last week the final goal of that plan was realized. The plan was to lose at least 30 pounds, lower my blood sugar levels, lower my dangerously high cholesterol and basically just get active. It took a while, I’m not going to lie, it has been hard, after all I’m still a student and working professional. That being said however I went from 255lbs to 213lbs and I’m still losing weight. My blood sugar is perfect without prescriptions, I run regularly, I lift weights regularly and just last week I found out that my cholesterol levels without medication were excellent. Lastly, my physical symptoms of stress (headaches, etc.) have largely been resolved.
I was so focused on school and accomplishing the seemingly meaningless goal of getting a 4.0GPA on my MBA transcript that I put everything from my family to myself on the back burner. The price was too high and in retrospect, it was foolish of me to do that. So the whole purpose of these last two posts has been to say this...take care of yourself and don’t make school an artificially high priority in your life. Sure it’s important, sure it will give you returns on your investment beyond what you can measure, but it’s not worth risking your health for. It can be difficult as school places a lot of stress and demands on your time. In fact the only things that take up as much of my time as school would be my job and my family, thus I consider school to be a big factor in one's lifestyle.
Anyhow, keep that balance everyone...